Grammatical description and corpus evidence : supposing, assuming, considering

Abstract

The use of large corpora provides abundant evidence of the actual usage of grammatical structures and function words and reveals the language behaviour of native speakers. One of the principles of corpus linguistics is that meaning is contextual: we can only identify the meaning of items by investigating the contexts in which they occur. In this paper I use data from a large corpus of English to describe the usage of three grammar words: supposing (that), assuming (that), considering (that). By analysing the regularities in the context of use of these grammar words I attempt to describe their function in discourse and to reveal what one must know in order to use and understand these words correctly. The results show that supposing (that), assuming (that) and considering (that.) convey different implications concerning the factuality of the clauses where they occur.